A standard comb for a comber for combing a fiber fleece in a combing direction has a support element and a plurality of comb teeth which engage into the fiber fleece and which are fixed next to one another in a row extending in a direction perpendicular to the combing direction.
The comber serves for finishing yarns formed of textile fibers. It is normally installed in the yarn production line between the card and the drawing frame. The main purpose of the comber is to strip out short fibers from the card sliver produced by the card, that is to improve the staple of the raw-fiber material while improving the parallel orientation of the individual fibers in the fiber fleece delivered from the card as a card sliver. A side effect attained by the comb is the cleaning of the fiber fleece of nets and husks.
In order to obtain the above-described improvements in the fiber fleece a circular comb rotating about a stationary axis passes through a fiber tuft of the fiber fleece fed from a feed cylinder and held by a gripper, then the combed fiber tuft is merged with an already combed fleece, and is pulled by engagement of a top comb in the fiber tuft with simultaneous pulling of the combed fleece from the feed cylinder and from the uncombed fleece. In this process the desired improvement of the parallelism of the individual fibers of the fiber fleece as well as the staple improvements by stripping out short fibers are effected by the interaction of the circular comb and the top comb.
The top comb of standard combers is normally formed as a support element in the form of a sheet-metal strip and comb teeth welded thereon in the form of flat needles. In particular at high operating speeds of the comber it has proven disadvantageous that using such top combs meets none of the requirements of high-value yarns of sufficient parallelism of the individual fibers of the fiber fleece, while simultaneously a substantial fouling of the top comb which makes frequent cleaning necessary is observed.